Former PlayStation boss Slams Sony's live service push as 'Repetitive action engagement device'

Shawn Layden, former Chairman and President of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, sat down with The Ringer and delivered a few scathing remarks about Sony’s current push for live-service games. He said, “A live-service game to me isn’t really a game. It’s a repetitive action engagement device.”

Toward the end of his tenure as PlayStation Studios boss, he also greenlit Helldivers 2 in 2019, which launched to monumental success on PlayStation and PC. However, he still didn’t pull his punches about Sony’s live-service pivot.

He said in the interview that real games need “three things.” Those three things are a story, a character, and a world. In contrast, he called live service titles as requiring only “a repetitive action that most people can get their head around, an ability to communicate in that world with other like-minded people, and the desire to do it again and again.”

Layden further added that Sony’s fixation on live-service projects is a “siren’s call” that has “ensorcelled” executives for years. He explained, “It’s like a mirage on the top of a sand dune. You pursue it. You can’t quite get there. Or if you do get there, what you brought to the party no one wants to play anyway.”

Layden made these statements as PlayStation continues its efforts in the live-service genre, a shift that was aggressively pursued under former CEO Jim Ryan.

In 2022, Jim Ryan announced that Sony planned to launch 12 new live-service games by 2026. However, Sony has canceled eight of these titles. These canceled live-service projects include Sony’s most ambitious live-service project, The Last of Us Online, a live-service God of War game, a Horizon MMO, Twisted Metal, and unannounced projects from Bend Studio and Bluepoint Games.

The most notable live-service title to receive widespread negative reception was PlayStation and Firewalk Studios Concord, which cost $400 million to develop, and peaked at around 697 concurrent players on Steam, before it was shut down after two weeks.

The only outlier in the PlayStation’s catalog was Helldivers 2, which remains one of PlayStation’s top-played games on PC and Xbox and has sold over 19 million copies across all platforms.

Buy Helldivers 2 on Amazon